CityZen: global emergency services app

The initial concepts

With the CityZen App, citizens can protect themselves and others by sending a public report from any location. This helps the city assets to gather more information about incidents and respond more efficiently.

Needs

The customer needed to provide a mobile app and a backend system to handle massive amounts of notifications and device connections coming from a significant crowd. The information collected includes pictures, audio, video, Geo location and other mobile sensor data. The solution had to be built within a short timeframe and limited budget, while maintaining the scalability, high availability and robustness required by such security related systems.

Solution

Following the initial discovery and architecture workshops, the essence of the identified solution was IoT (Internet of things) based. It was decided to follow a serverless approach, allowing to build the system in a short timeframe (6 months). This was made possible by using Azure IoT Hub, Azure Storage, Cosmos DB, Azure Functions and Azure Web App platform on the backend. The mobile client application was developed with two versions – native Android and native iOS – which maximizes control over the devices and device sensors.

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